General Hospital
By Debbie Stowe
May 2005
When
friends ask what life is like in Romania, I answer with a proviso. My life
here is characterised by a lot of leisure time, affordable access to things
that in England I considered luxuries – restaurant meals, a nice city
centre flat, taxis – as well as respect in my profession and people’s
general interest in and friendliness towards me. Probably not how the typical
Romanian would describe life here. Contrasting expat and local experience
throws up several dichotomies: cheap/expensive, easy/tough, friendliness/hostility,
choices/lack of choice.
But – setting aside the impact of diet, lifestyle and poverty – health is a great leveller. So I mused when I rolled up, uninsured, to the Stefan Cel Mare emergency hospital, or at least might have done had I not been faced with the greater immediate concern of a finger protruding from my hand at an unprecedented angle. Doorframes have a philosophy of equal opportunities – they do not care if they are fracturing a Western or a Romanian metatarsal.
General casualty clamour, a lack of food since breakfast and that general nauseous hospital panic I get combined with the pain of the break to send me into a faint, that was ignored by the staff until my boyfriend began threatening to get the British Embassy involved. Other patients and relatives kept me upright until I found myself ushered into a crammed ward and put on a bed.
My past experience of Romania’s medical system has been private sector. I had tests at Victor Babes clinic, where the luminous white floors were perpetually being cleaned by spotless assistants. I doubt that I have ever been in a more sanitary establishment. There, where I also fainted, at my whisper of the word faint, I was immediately surrounded by four nurses, tipped backwards, a cold compress on my head and alcohol under my nose. I told those nurses about a fainting episode I had had in America, where the doctors let me faint, and when I came around presented me with a cup of tea which, as I was British, they presumed would make me feel better. “Well, you’re in Romania now,” they said.
That previous visit did give me a brief but worrying insight into the Romanian public health system: my lung x-ray was conducted in the public part of the clinic, in a dirty room, with the radiologist smoking and grunting as she worked.
Happily, this time the radiographer – whom I visited after chocolate and juice had revived me – did not smoke. When the x-ray came back, the doctor looked at my finger, pronounced it not broken and said I should go home and rest it. Although pleased with the diagnosis, I retained the niggling suspicion that my finger was still extending at an angle at which fingers ought not to extend. My boyfriend pointed down the x-ray to a large crack in the metatarsal.
Within around an hour I was in a pair of pyjamas lying in an operating theatre. Being British, and therefore weaned on a televisual diet of daily hospital soaps, the scene was familiar to me, although I had never had an operation or been in a theatre. The assistant – whose first words to me were “Don’t be scared” – had a textbook bedside manner, and it seemed that her main job was to talk to me during the procedure and keep me calm. She told me that if there was anything at all I wanted I had only to ask. “Glass of water?” I whimpered. “Sorry, no,” she said.
While the wards that I was in, before and after the
operation, might seem a little second-world in terms of facilities –
cranky beds of different height and shape, with barely enough space in between
to stand up – the theatre looked as spic as anything from ER or Casualty.
A curtain was erected to hide from me the hideous spectacle of my arm being
sliced open, my limb was washed in brown fluid, the anaesthetic administered
– and we were off.
To illustrate the slavishness with which Romanians regard their mobile phones
– answering them everywhere from restaurants and cinemas to classical
concerts – I used to joke that a surgeon would probably interrupt an
operation to take a call. From now on when I relate this it will no longer
be a joke – somebody really took a call during the op.
It went quickly, and some four hours after the break I was back home with a plate of pasta. Had the same thing happened in Britain by that time I would have been about half way through my wait in casualty to be seen. For the next few days I had to report at six in the morning. This was later put back to eight, although it transpired that it was equally okay to turn up at half past ten, and that arriving on time for appointments made little difference to waiting time once there.
It’s a public hospital, and all strata of society were there, from pleasant business people to a young punk sneaking a crafty cigarette on the stairs with his friends, a Roma being thrown out and a glue sniffer becoming increasingly agitated and profane as he waited for the doctor.
Throughout the operation and the subsequent visits, the medical staff – from the surgeon to the lift operator – were almost always kind and pleasant, making what could have been an ordeal into something bearable. But I was even more humbled by the attitude of the other patients. During painful and undignified injections in my rear, women with much worse injuries winced and smiled in sympathy. Those who could speak English were quick to help and translate; those who could not responded warmly to my buna dimineatas.
When my cast comes off I’ll be left with a scar on my hand. But I hope that I’ll also be left with the memory of the moments of shared humanity with people whom I would never have met in the expat’s Romania of the good life.
